In recent years, an imaging apparatus capable of imaging a moving picture in addition to a still picture (e.g., a digital still camera), and an imaging apparatus capable of imaging a still picture in addition to a moving picture (e.g., a digital video camera) have become widely used. By the way, the still picture imaged by the digital still camera is strongly influenced by the culture of photography (e.g., silver halide photography). Therefore, for this still picture, the aspect ratio (the ratio of horizontal length to vertical length) of 4:3 or 3:2 has commonly been used, which is the same as that used in silver halide photography. Also, when printing the still picture, the aspect ratio of 4:3, 3:2 or the like has commonly been used.
On the other hand, the moving picture imaged by the digital still camera is strongly influenced by television broadcasts. Therefore, for this moving picture, the aspect ratio of 4:3 has commonly been used, which is the same as that used in television programs of terrestrial analog broadcasting. Also, in recent years, a television monitor capable of displaying high-resolution television programs of terrestrial digital broadcasting has become widely used, which has driven the development of a digital still camera capable of imaging a moving picture with an aspect ratio of 16:9, which is the same as that used in the high-resolution television programs.
Furthermore, a digital still camera capable of imaging still and moving pictures having different aspect ratios (such as a still picture with an aspect ratio of 4:3 and a moving picture with an aspect ratio of 16:9) in a time-division manner has been proposed (see JP-A-2006-148273, for example).
By the way, when imaging still and moving pictures having different aspect ratios in a time-division manner using a conventional digital still camera, an object is imaged by an imaging unit including a charge-coupled device (CCD), and then, from a picture resulted from the imaging (also referred to as “original picture”), still and moving pictures having desired aspect ratios are generated and recorded to a recording medium.
For example, consider that the aspect ratio of an original picture is 4:3, and according to this, the aspect ratio of a still picture is set to 4:3, and the aspect ratio of a moving picture is set to 16:9. In this case, the above-described digital still camera, for example, records the original picture as a still picture with the same aspect ratio of 4:3, while extracting and recording a moving picture with an aspect ratio of 16:9 from the original picture by trimming the top and bottom of the original picture. Note that this moving picture includes a plurality of temporally successive pictures.
However, when the moving picture is extracted by trimming the top and bottom of the original picture in this way, the range of extracting the moving picture is narrower in vertical direction than the range of imaging the original picture. As the result, as shown in FIG. 1, even if a person is imaged fully using an imaging range R1 displayed on a display of the digital still camera, the head of the person and the like positioned in the top of the original picture is excluded from an extraction range R2 for the moving picture and then truncated.
As the result, the generated moving picture is obviously different from what is intended by a user (that is, a moving picture lacking an important part of the object is generated). The term “object” used herein means a portion that the user intends to image using the imaging apparatus (for example, the upper body of a person, a part of a landscape, etc).
Thus, the conventional digital still camera can record still and moving pictures having different aspect ratios, but the range of extracting a still picture and the range of extracting a moving picture are fixed, so the trimming for changing the aspect ratio may cause a still or moving picture lacking an important part of the object to be recorded.